Henry E Lowood

Contact

Location

Henry's role in the library

I am the Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. You can find me in the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Group in Green Library.

You will find more information about the History of Science & Technology and Film & Media Collections elsewhere on the Libraries’ website.

Course Guides by Henry

Professional activities

Since 2000, I have headed a project first funded by the Stanford Humanities Laboratory and, since the demise of SHL, continued in the Libraries: How They Got Game: The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Videogames. The results of this project have included courses such as History of Computer Game Design or The Consumer as Creator in Contemporary Media. The main focus of the project is the history and preservation of digital games, virtual worlds and interactive simulations as emerging new media forms.

Other accomplishments of the How They Got Game project thus far include two significant museum exhibits that took place in 2003 and 2004, featuring installations from the worlds of computer games, art and military simulation; the Machinima Archive , a digital archival repository for this new game-based medium; the 73 Easting archives at Stanford University, which documents the most important military simulation of the 1990s; and numerous panels, conferences, and publications. We also completed two three-year projects with HPS Simulations related to the development of historical conflict simulations using HPS' new Point of Attack 2 game, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Our contributions included an extensive program of historical map scanning and the creation of an historical archive of HPS records and player activities.

Since the beginning of 2008, I have been leading the Stanford group in a project first funded by the U.S. Library of Congress called "Preserving Virtual Worlds." We worked with the University of Illinois, University of Maryland, Rochester Institute of Technology, Linden Lab, the Internet Archive, and others on this exciting project. The final reportof this first Preserving Virtual Worlds project has been completed. We have also started Preserving Virtual Worlds II with the same group of partners; this project is funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services and is currently underway.

More information about my research, writing, teaching and speaking about the history of technology and game studies is on my c.v. page. One highlight: MIT Press published The Machinima Reader, which I co-edited with Michael Nitsche, last year. It makes a great gift for just about anyone.

For some twenty years, I was editor of the "Current Bibliography in the History of Technology" of the Society for the History of Technology. This bibliography is one of the components of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine database available through the Libraries' database page.

"The Future of Virtual Worlds," (with William Sims Bainbridge, Wayne Lutters and Diana Rhoten," in: Online Worlds: The Convergence of the Real and the Virtual, ed. William Sims Bainbridge (London: Springer, 2010): 289-302.

Guest editor, July-Sept. 2009 issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

"Video Games in Computer Space: The Complex History of Pong," IEEE Annals in the History of Computing (July-Sept. 2009): 5-19. [An earlier online version was available via "pong.mythos: Ein Spiel und seine Geschichte," accompanying exhibit of the Computerspiele Museum (Berlin), 11 Feb.-19 March 2006. This version has been superseded. Please do not cite it.]

Editor, Before It's Too Late: A Digital Game Preservation White Paper (N.p.: International Game Developers Association, 2009; distributed by Lulu Press) Also published in American Journal of Play 2:2 (Fall 2009).